^{Alvin Greene outside of his Manning, S.C., home on Wednesday, June 9. The 32-year-old unemployed Army veteran from the rural South Carolina town surprised the Democratic establishment with his upset victory over Charleston County councilman and former legislator and judge Vic Rawl for U.S. Senate in the S.C. Democratic Primary elections June 8. He will challenge Jim DeMint in the fall.}

Story by Corey Hutchins
Photos by Sean Rayford

On the Wednesday morning following the June 8 primary elections, the South Carolina Democratic Party was in a state of apoplectic shock. It had made national news again for all the wrong reasons.

State party executive director Jay Parmley looked like he’d bitten down on a joy buzzer as he sat in the chair of his office, scrolling up and down the precinct reports on his computer monitor shaking his head, cursing under his breath, wondering why, why, why; how, how, how?

In the race for United States Senate, political unknown Alvin M. Greene had walloped challenger Vic Rawl. 

Around the state, Democratic activists were facing the smacking electoral truth that a non-campaigning, unemployed, black, country-living, coo-coo-for-Cocoa-Puffs nobody who’d been kicked out of the Army and was currently facing federal sex charges had just beaten — in the Democratic primary, and by 17 percentage points — a well-known former legislator, judge and current Charleston County councilman who’d raised a quarter of a million bucks for the race and for months been campaigning his ass off.

The news wasn’t sinking in as much as it was settling like a depth charge. 

^{Greene flashes a V-for-victory sign outside of his home in Manning. Greene unexpectedly walloped Vic Rawl to win the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.}

Greene Who?

On March 16, Greene had walked into the Democratic party headquarters in Columbia and tried to give them a personal check for the $10,400 filing fee to run for U.S. Senate. Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Folwer told him he needed to start a campaign account; several hours later he returned with a campaign check. He asked that his name, address and picture be immediately put on the party website, showing he’d filed. 

Then his candidacy went dark. Greene never filed with the Secretary of the Senate, according to its Washington, D.C. office. He didn’t file with the Federal Elections Commission, which the FEC requires by law. 

When the state Democratic Party held its convention in April, Greene didn’t even show up. 

He won anyway, taking in over 100,000 votes and beating the vigorously campaigning Vic Rawl, 58 to 42 percent. He won in all but four counties. 

By mid-morning June 9, following his unexpected win, Fowler was hemmed in her office by a camera crew from ABC — unfortunately not WOLO-TV, the local affiliate, she said — who were asking her point blank if she thought Greene was a Republican plant set up in the primary to bump Rawl off the ballot for November. 

Who knew what to believe at that point? 

Fowler didn’t recall giving a quote that had been attributed to her saying she believed, maybe, that voters just chose Greene’s name because it appeared above Rawl’s on the ballot alphabetically. 

“I don’t believe that,” she said later. She looked at Parmley and the two shook their heads in tandem. What on earth had happened? 

By noon, in Charleston, a Rawl supporter was screaming on the phone that all the voting machines in the state should be locked up and a forensic investigator called in to find out what in the world had gone so terribly wrong. 

A Lowcountry attorney who had campaigned heavily for Rawl, William Hamilton was convinced something nefarious was up. He’d always had his suspicions about Greene’s candidacy, but never expected he’d pull off an actual win in the primary. Espcially by such numbers. Hamilton’s son voted for the first time in his life Tuesday – apparently for nothing. There had been good people, good Democrats, working their tails off to get Rawl elected. They made phone calls, they made ads, they drove all over the state. 

“What else could we do?” he asked. 

Hamilton was afraid of a national narrative that might start to congeal by the end of the day: That the South Carolina Democratic Party was indeed just completely and royally f#!ked. Look who they’d just nominated. Somebody queue The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and start looking for the highest bridge from which to jump. 

^{Clarendon County coroner Hayes Samuals points to an Alvin Greene campaign flyer. It's one of the few tangible pieces of campaign literature found advocating Greene's campaign.}

Conspiracy Theories vs. Electoral Reality

The question everyone had, of course, was “How could it have happened?” 

So far, three major possibilities have emerged: 

Theory one: Greene was a Republican plant set up by a shadowy GOP cabal and his win was orchestrated by a crack team of Blackwater-type professional election riggers who pulled off the entire thing without a hitch. They paid his filing fee, paid off black preachers to sing his praises to the voters and then leaked his federal arrest to the media the moment he got elected. 

The theory goes that Susan Gaddy, a liberal Democrat who ran in the Republican primary against DeMint, might have annoyed somebody in Washington enough for them make a point in the Palmetto State. Also, Rawl was only seven points behind DeMint in a recent InsideAdvantage/StatehouseReport poll. DeMint wouldn’t want the embarrassment of even a close race in his home state where nationally he’s a conservative standard bearer for the free-market corporate cause. 

The problem is, it would take a vast conspiracy among programmers who didn’t even know each other to pull off something via the voting machines, says Steve Skardon, director of the Palmetto Project, a non-profit that analyzes voter trends and reports, among other things. Each machine, he says, has four separate memory banks inside and the machines shut themselves down if a human screws something up.  

Also, the state Democratic Party catches a whiff of nearly everything that’s discussed, mailed or used as campaign material when it comes to Democratic campaigns statewide, says executive director Parmley. No one heard anything about Greene during the campaign, he says. 

Adding to the speculation was Columbia Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn. 

“There were some real shenanigans going on in the South Carolina primary,” he said during an appearance on the liberal Bill Press radio show. “I don't know if he was a Republican plant; he was someone’s plant.” 

The Palmetto State primary elections seemed to have turned from an exercise in democracy into a crime scene. 

“The thing is, for the Democratic Party to pull something like this off it would be like the Apollo program,” Hamilton says. “But to the GOP it’s like a weekend game of slots in Vegas.” 

Theory two: Blacks spell Greene with an “e” on the end, and the average voter in a South Carolina Democratic primary is a black woman. Also, Greene’s name appeared above Rawl’s on the ballot and the name Rawl sounds like white Charleston aristocracy. Most voters didn’t know who Greene or Rawl was and Rawl didn’t campaign enough to earn high name recognition even though he certainly campaigned very hard throughout the state. A massively uninformed electorate chose the name Greene over Rawl and it’s just that simple. 

The problem is, when it comes to absentee ballots, Rawl beat Greene two-to-one. 

“So whatever happened, happened on Election Day,” Skardon says. 

Rawl had raised around $250,000 and campaigned all over the place. He met everyone he needed to meet when it came to state Democratic politics. He had supporters behind him with influence. He was a well-known former legislator and judge and a current office holder in Charleston. He should have walked away with the nomination. 

Kevin Gray, a prominent black activist and author in South Carolina, says he voted for Greene.

"When I was in the voting booth I looked at both those names," he says. "I'd seen Vic Rawl on Facebook before, but Alvin Greene, that name looked black."

Gray adds that he doesn't think Rawl did much for trying to win with black voters and that many Democratic candidates in the state think the black vote is a given.

Theory three: The ballots were flipped. 

The theory goes that in many polling places the calibration of the machines could have been off and people meaning to vote for Rawl unknowingly voted for Greene. That could be backed up by the fact that Greene won Richland County, a Democratic voting area with a largely informed electorate where Rawl had campaigned and was a major presence among Democrats. Greene also won in areas with large non-black voting populations. 

Rawl, however, won his home county of Charleston. 

Whatever happened, eyes all over the world were on the open wound that was the South Carolina Democratic Party and no one seemed to able to find out the source of what had infected its primary. 

“You can have sympathy for the Ebola victim rotting on the sidewalk,” Hamilton says of the national reaction, “but have no interest or care about the actual disease.” 

^{Spencer Tindell, owner of Spencer and Tom's barbershop in Manning, reacts to the news of Alvin Greene's pending felony obscenity charges for allegedly showing pornography to a University of South Carolina student. Tindell says he's cut the hair of James Greene, Alvin Greene's father, for decades.}

A Mystery in Manning

The June 9 midday headlines crawling across TV screens and Internet news feeds were proving the “Mystery Man from Manning” was going to dominate the first part of the national election news cycle. Greene’s landline had been ringing in the house he shares with his dad and brother since the numbers came in the night before. 

In the small town of Manning, where Greene had grown up and moved back to a year and two days before, things were weird the morning after Election Day. 

Spencer and Tom’s barbershop on East Boyce Street downtown was buzzing with locals watching a TV that hangs from the ceiling and asking each other, “Who is Alvin Greene?” 

One of the barbershop owners, Spencer Tindell, kept swearing that the man lived just down the road on highway 521. 

A month ago, Greene had moseyed into the shop and handed Tindell a campaign flyer copied on a sheet of printer paper. He hadn’t even brought any tape. Greene asked Tindell if he’d go down to the courthouse and fill Greene’s name in on an absentee ballot and if he’d put up the flier. Then he just moseyed on out. 

Tindell recalls Greene being incredibly nonchalant about it. “Positive, but low-key,” is he how he put it June 9, in the barber shop, shortly before a 5 p.m. news ticker flashed across the TV screen with the alert that Greene had been charged with showing pornography to a USC student in November. 

Tindell’s eyes widened. “Daaaaaamn,” he said, turning up the volume. “I thought Manning was going to put on the good side of the map.” He put down the remote and shook his head. 

Manning is like many small South Carolina towns where you know your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor. But not many in Manning knew Alvin Greene. Some who did say he was a strange kid growing up, a quiet kid, a loner. They talk about him the way a neighbor might describe a killer or the man who later becomes president. It’s always, of course, the quiet ones. 

On the morning of June 9, Senate Minority Leader John Land, the longest serving legislator in the General Assembly and who is sometimes referred to as “The Don of Clarendon County,” was just learning that the guy who won his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate lived right down the road. 

“I still don’t know him,” Land says in his law office, waving an iPhone in one hand and thumbing through a phone book with the other, trying to find Greene’s last name, a look of utter bemusement painted across his face.  

Land remembers watching Alvin’s father, James, for years walking in and out of the post office across the street from his office window. James wore a straw hat and went to the post office religiously every day around the same time. Land never knew the Greene boy, though. Now he’d just been chosen to top the Democratic ticket in November. 

^{Clarendon County coroner Hayes Samuals talks about Alvin Greene in the conference room of his funeral parlor in Manning. Samuals says Greene was "a nice kid."}

A Family History From the Undertaker 

If you want to know something about someone in Manning, you have to seek out Hayes Samuals. 

Samuals is the county coroner, and in the small town he lives, he also serves as the local undertaker. He’s been running the family funeral home on Church Street for decades and makes it his business to know the business of everyone in town. 

Sitting in the conference room of his funeral parlor, decked out with Clyburn campaign signs and a life-sized cutout of President Obama, Samuals recounted everything he knew about the Greene family after hearing one of their boys had just unleashed a major upset in the election the day before. 

A solidly built middle-aged black man with a shaved head, a graying goatee and glasses, Samuals explained how Alvin Greene’s father has been a well-known political figure in Manning since back in the day. 

Alvin’s win had shocked everybody in town, he said, but he wasn’t surprised the kid did what he did — even the way he did it. 

Alvin’s father, James Greene, retired from the Clemson Extension Program where he used to teach. In his time, he was a barber and a nightclub owner who wanted blacks to play a bigger role in politics and entertainment. An outspoken activist for Democratic politics, he was a prominent fixture in town who once brought a private carnival to Manning many years ago when the American Legion stopped doing it. 

“His parents were go-getters,” Samuals says of Alvin. “His folks were aggressive people who wanted their kids to have a good education.” 

Samuals doesn’t believe any of the conspiracy theories surrounding Greene’s win or why he might have gotten in the race to begin with. He says his father has money and Alvin probably has a good chunk still from his time in the Army even though he doesn’t have a job. 

“He was a nice kid,” he said.  “I’m glad to hear he won.”

^{Alvin Greene speaks outside of his home in Manning on Wednesday, June 9. Greene defeated Charleston County Councilman Vic Rawl in the primary election on June 8; the unemployed Army veteran is now the Democratic challenger to incumbent U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint.}

Alvin Greene, Meet the Press 

Alvin Greene’s bizarre statements had been making their way into stories by the Washington Post and Mother Jones magazine, among others, all day June 9. A rambler, who often needs prompting and prodding to elicit coherent responses, Greene started hanging up on some reporters by noon, obviously annoyed and, perhaps feeling threatened. 

The news of his arrest on the USC campus in November and the fact that he was out on bail had turned him cold to press. News outlets had starting picking up on his arrest record and responses from the girl who’d complained about him were becoming more frequent. 

Last fall, Greene had used an old student ID card to get access to the USC library where he sat down next to a freshman girl and asked her to look at his computer screen. On it was pornographic material. Greene laughed and asked the girl if the two could go back to her dorm room. Greene has yet to plead to the charge or make much of a comment about it beyond saying “No comment.” 

The victim was shocked to see Greene in the news and told ABC she thought what happened was behind her. Her mother said Greene didn’t have $10,400 when they went to court; she wanted to know where the money came from for his filing fee. 

By shortly before 6 p.m. in Manning, a WLTX news truck was parked in Greene’s front yard with a reporter waiting for a live interview for the evening broadcast. 

Greene wouldn’t come outside. 

Inside the brick house he was shouting on the phone and arguing with his brother, James Jr., who was acting as his de facto spokesman by relaying Alvin’s answers to reporters outside. Missing the 6 p.m. broadcast, the news truck lowered its antenna and drove off.

James Jr., is a 47-year-old mustachioed corrections officer at Wateree correctional facility. He came out of the house dressed in his uniform. He said Alvin was done talking with reporters, he had no comments about the pending charges, and that it would “work its way through the court system.” 

After several more attempted requests for an interview and an eventual compromise that no questions about the criminal case would be asked, Alvin agreed, through his brother, to come outside to talk with Free Times, but he didn’t want to appear in direct sunlight. 

Standing in the shade of his garage, shuffling back and forth with a family of small, scruffy, dusty cats slithering around his feet, Greene said he wasn’t surprised about his win. 

When he speaks, it’s as though Greene is participating in some kind of linguistic steeplechase in which he always seems to trip over the hurdle and has a hard time climbing out of the waterhole. 

He often interrupts himself or just quits talking mid-sentence. He says “OK” before nearly everything. He’ll say one thing and then say the opposite. When he gets “on message” it’s as if he’s reading some invisible script for several sentences before blowing it and sounding like he’s reading something written upside-down. 

Asked if he thought everyone who voted for him knew who he was, he said “Of course not. It’s not luck. I got 60 percent of the vote. Sixty percent of the vote is not a mistake. [It’s] not accidental. [It’s] decisive.” 

“I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “I mean, I worked hard.” 

He would not elaborate about what that meant. He refused to say how he campaigned for the job beyond saying it was, “Simple, old-fashioned, simple old-fashioned.” 

Asked when he started campaigning he said, “Right away. I started campaigning right away.” He clarified that what he meant was March. 

“The main issue is jobs and getting South Carolina back to work,” he said often. “More are unemployed now than any other time and I’m one of the unemployed.” 

He would often lose track of what he was talking about. His friends and neighbors who surrounded him cringed. 

“Twice of our taxpayers dollars are on inmates than students,” Greene said. “And so we need to get our priorities in order in South Carolina and across the country. Like my campaign slogan says: ‘Let’s get South Carolina back to work.’ My key issues is jobs, education and justice.” 

He said he had a bachelor’s degree in political science from USC. He would like to debate his Republican opponent, U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, on a cable news channel in September. 

“I funded my campaign entirely with my personal money,” he said. “I didn’t have to spend much.” He clarified that he’d spent a little more than $500, but wouldn’t say what he’d spent it on. He said he self-managed his bid. He’ll have to raise money, he said, to get “fancy campaign material.” 

Greene said the state Democratic Party seemed as if they were against him. 

“I’m the Democrats of South Carolina’s candidate,” he said. “I’m the Democrats’ candidate. Democrats’ candidate. The people of South Carolina have spoken. I’m the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate, and you have to be pro-South Carolina, instead of anti-Greene.” 

He said he asked his father for some political advice and took the advice of family, friends and friends of friends, but wouldn’t say who. 

“We’ve gotten away from the common touch, and I did that. Simple, old-fashioned campaign.” He still wouldn’t elaborate. 

He said he was “about worn out” from all the phone calls. 

Greene wouldn’t directly answer if someone paid him to run or even asked him to run. He said some really whacked-out things about creating a “one Korea” as part of his foreign policy agenda. 

Greene said, “No black has won a Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina for over 100 years. It hasn’t been done since Reconstruction after the Civil War. That’s just something…that’s just history. That’s just an interesting fact.” 

^{Just down Highway 521 in rural Clarendon County, feral cats patrol the land surrounding the home of Alvin Greene. Greene came out of nowhere — almost literally — to win the South Carolina Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate.}

In a lighter part of the interview, asked the name of one of the cats that was playing around his feet, Greene looked down at it. 

“Uh…” he said and paused. “Purry,” he said finally to the laughter of his friends and family around him, as if he’d just made it up. “Yeah, no, Purr,” he said. “Or Purr. Purr. Purr. The cat’s name is Purr.” 

At one point Alvin’s father came to the door and waved a phone at Greene. His father, 81, who is bedridden and looks unhealthily thin, did not appear amused at the hullabaloo going on in the garage. Alvin’s brother, James Jr., was already doing the “cut” gesture across his throat for the interview to end. 

As the small crowd of family and friends dispersed an elderly neighbor beckoned for a reporter to come back behind his truck. He was shaking his head. 

“He ain’t wrapped tight,” the man said gesturing toward Greene’s house. He said he hadn’t voted for Greene and couldn’t believe what had happened. 

“I ain’t know how the hell he got all them damn votes, though,” he said. “He got a pile of damn votes.” 

The man looked back at Greene’s house with a twisted smile on his face. “I don’t understand that,” he said. “All them damn votes he had.” 

The man paused and shook his head slowly as the dying sunlight filtered through the trees.

“Something ain’t right,” he said.

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